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European Commission Outlines Steps To Restore Trust In EU-US Data Flows
hypnosec writes "The European Commission has outlined steps it believes will pave the way for restoring faith in EU-U.S. data flows following revelations about NSA spying activities under its PRISM program. The EC notes that spying on its citizens, companies, and leaders is unacceptable; and that citizens of U.S. and EU need to be reassured about protection of their data, while companies need to be reassured that the existing agreements between the two regions are respected and enforced. The Commission outlined a total of six areas that it believes require action including swift adoption of the EU's data protection reforms; making Safe Harbor safer; strengthening data protection safeguards in the law enforcement area; commitment from the U.S. for making use of a legal framework; addressing European concerns in the on-going U.S. reform process; and promoting privacy standards internationally."
>> addressing European concerns in the on-going U.S. reform process
Really, we have an active privacy reform process in the US? I haven't heard much about that since Obamacare finally went off the rails.
lol Euro-weenies always finding an excuse to lick boot
More lies! This will work this time. We're sure of it!
You'd be a fool to trust the US anywhere near your data these days. All the stuff revealed lately is just *some* of what's what.
What we don't yet know.......
Justice has been severely folded, bent, mutilated, and trampled. It's going to take DECADES to restore even a small percentage of the trust erased lately.
Difficult to *restore* a faith that was never there.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Heh, that's a good one. How do you restore trust in a system that is corrupt by design, not by defect? You cannot ever trust any system to works on concentrated authority. It is impossible to acquire adequate oversight.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's the more concise headline today at Reuters -- http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/us-eu-us-security-idUSBRE9AQ0F120131127
The European Union backed down on Wednesday from threats to suspend agreements granting the United States access to European data, rejecting calls for a tougher stance over alleged U.S. spying.
The move marks an abrupt about-turn for the European Commission, the EU executive, after warnings it issued in July to U.S. officials following revelations that Washington had spied on European citizens and EU institutions.
Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU's commissioner for home affairs, said she had found no proof of U.S. wrongdoing, either in the sharing of flight passenger records or in the tracking of international payments...
Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch Liberal member of the European Parliament, criticized the Commission's move.
"They are putting diplomatic relations ahead of citizens rights. The Commission is being extremely timid to the Americans," she told Reuters.
"They have done an investigation and concluded that everything is hunky dory. This is not serious," she said, adding that taking the United States at its word was naive.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The EC notes that spying on its citizens, companies, and leaders is unacceptable; and that citizens of U.S. and EU need to be reassured about protection of their data
Either you don't spy on everybody or don't even bother making a statement. Humans are humans whether citizens of your country or not. As long as you make a distinction between your own citizens and others you generate ill will towards yourselves, which creates enemies, which forces you to get defensive.
Your forefathers made proclomations about Human Rights, not citizen rights. Listen to them, they had the right idea, do the right thing and treat all humans equally.
When the NSA offers to sell the EU the technology at reduced prices. :)
When we have flaps like this that occur, you know, something will change, and I expect we'll get some sort of announcement that will - that the Europeans can point to as a curtailment and as a change. But as time goes by, flaps blow over, and the permanent interests of ourselves and our allies reassert themselves.
Paul Pillar, 28-year veteran of the CIA
Their member countries do just as much, if not more, than the US and other countries have done.
My faith in US-EU data flows would be restored if we changed the underlying protocols of the Internet to require that everything be fully encrypted all the time with the purpose of allowing companies to just shrug their shoulders and say that they were sorry but it's simply not possible to tell who sent any particular packet or what its final destination is.
It also would be nice if Alexander and Clapper were charged with perjury for lying to the faces of our representatives, and it would be even nicer if the NSA, whose business is now almost entirely comprised of funneling billions of dollars of taxpayer money to good-ol-boy outsourced IT departments and equipment manufacturers and has nothing to do with decrypting enemy communications in wartime, were abolished entirely.
Who in their right mind could trust USA? Unicorns are more real than trust in USA. Spying, 2 wars based on lies and deceit, lots of profiteering at everyone's expense, patent trolling and other IP based litigation nonsense, shoving harmful legislation down everyones throats- all of that is coming from US.
Well, unless it's "trust" as in "I trust US to screw everyone at every opportunity".
--Coder
If the EU had at least the same size balls as Brazil, they would demand reciprocity.
Let's see how long the Americans would tolerate their data being "safely shared" with Europe's governments.
What? A storm during thanksgiving? Snow at Christmas! Playoffs? The superbowl !!!!! (5, for insanity)
What was the topic again, Obamacare?
At best, this is an academic exercise with no practical consequences.
The NSA will simply say: "This doesn't align with our needs", and that will be the end of it.
The NSA has demonstrated that it can operate in secrecy, with unchecked power. The harrumphings of some European committee will have no effect on this fact.
move along citizen
"The USA isn't always like that, only when I do something wrong. I love the USA, I could never stop being it's partner." - EU
Be seeing you...
1. Trust No One
That's it. Cryptography has always and will always run on jungle rules.
Either you break it and get the cleartext, or you can't break it and you don't get the cleartext.
There is no middle ground. They can read your messages and spy on you or they can't.
If your "allies" can read your messages, they will. Full stop.
Seriously? We just don't need to share that much information. There's no "reform" unless the US stops breaking ITS OWN LAWS. That's where reform starts.
As much as I would hate an even "worse" US life, I think it'd be for the best that the way government here is doing business ceases to be profitable.
Preferably by a drone strike. US can't collect data if it has nowhere to store it.
If this is not resolved, a standard recommendation in European companies' security meetings will be "do not store any business data on servers located in USA".
From the same people who brought you "the right to be forgotten" and "mandatory data retention," comes more arrogant commerce-grounded posturing.
Keeping the data outside the US makes it easier to spy on, not harder.
The "flow of data" model is trade protectionism without any clear threat model.
The massive privacy holocaust of our era---jailed phone operating systems with forceful permissions bargaining, unclearable cookie-replacements trackable across apps, ubiquitous location tracking and contacts-snarfing, and an evolved market of "apps" built around monetizing the direct trade of personal information, not ads---seems mostly off their radar while they throw sneering pebbles at the biggest US companies they can find.
IMVHO US big data companies would benefit from regulation, but I see no one around to regulate them in a competent and sophisticated enough way to do further good. EU regulators have accomplished only ridiculous things: they've cut down on "newsletters" from web merchants and plastered absurd, meaaningless cookie banners over every web site. They don't seem to have the competence, the will, or the mandate to do any better. By comparison, the FTC has been quietly much more productive: their December 2009 consent decree on Facebook and the March 2011 Google Buzz consent decree have made meaningful, lasting changes in the privacy UI's at both companies, targeting both user-visible and user-invisible assaults, and creating departments and auditing regimes within the companies to make the changes lasting and sincerely-intended instead of just EU-style wallpaper.
And, if you consider technical security rather than UI design and product-manager-type decisions, the tools top US companies implement to defend against insider threats from Chinese and American spies go way beyond anything the EU could hope to enforce, and also beyond anything a smaller company would be capable of.
These guys are worse than nothing, TBQH. And I've always felt half of it is sort of racist: a bunch of European sad teddy bears who have accomplished very little themselves trying to be relevant by regulating.
So the EU rolls overs and is a good bitch for the US again? Pathetic! I don't know what is worse, the fact the US has no morals, or the fact the EU has no balls?
The EU tried going the trust route and it got burned. This situation is indicative of the scorpion and the frog.
Step 1 : Dismantle the NSA, and file criminal charges against their leadership.
Step 2 : There is no step 2.
This signature is false.
Alleged? What part of the official U.S. policy and actions they have admitted to, apologized for but vowed to continue, is alleged?
That is not a neutral story. I wouldn't trust it.
Remember how undersea cables kept getting broken by anchors? Was the NSA behind this? It could happen in at least 2 ways:
1. Break the cable, the repairer installs interception device.
2. Break the cable, tell the operator that breaks will keep happening unless the operator allows access to its network.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I for one would never trust EU-US data flows - the US side will always ignore any treaties about privacy and steal the personal information of EU citizens.
Always.
Without question.
This is why the US is 31st in download speeds - we reward insanity.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The Commission isn't speaking for me. I hate this corrupt bunch. It makes me sad, because basically, I'm pro-EU.
I can't understand why the Senator is shocked that our spies lied to him. They are SPIES, after all! Do you really expect that spies are going to tell you the truth about anything?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
We have some equipment at work, with factory and maintenance access codes. Those codes change, seemingly at random, until you know the secret. Date and time determines the proper access codes. I suppose that it would be a fairly simple matter to only allow access within certain time frames - that is, simply to null xx% of the now-valid codes.
This isn't a new system, by any means. The machinery runs SysV dated late 1990's.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Restore the (mistaken) /belief/ that you can trust the US.
I.o.w.get some sense of naievete back.
I fear that's gonna be a cinch. Apathy has been a high
demand US export item for longer than just the past year.
But following that up by saying you want to protect existing agreements seems to imply to me: We're going to keep spying on you and blackmailing you, but we're going to hide it better, promise!
Same shit, different day.
It's great they're talking about reforms to prevent this happening again, but there's one critical element no one is talking about: prosecuting people for the crimes they already committed. The NSA has been breaking laws on a massive scale all over the world, but there hasn't been one single prosecution of anyone for any of them. Until they see the law applies to them too, they'll have no reason to not just keep ignoring it. And then all the reforms in the world will be nothing but paper, things to ignore just like everything else they find inconvenient.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
This is at two levels, as Washington sinks deeper into the swamp, and can't even control Government Agencies, first real trust and friendship is fatally damaged, and we will soon TEA Party your friends over here, and it dosn't work since you leave yourselves fatally open to false flag injection. These people are not only crooks, they are traitors to the US Constitution and as dumb as a bag of bricks!
This is at two levels, as Washington sinks deeper into the swamp, and can't even control Government Agencies,
first real trust and friendship is fatally damaged, and we will soon TEA Party your friends over here, and it dosn't work
since you leave yourselves fatally open to false flag injection.
These people are not only crooks, they are traitors to the US Constitution and as dumb as a bag of bricks!
Dumb as a bag of bricks? Yeah I guess that describes the Tea Party.
Nobody. Not the NSA guy who *lied* to Congress (a huge, serious crime). Not any of the other liars. I think they'll even let Snowden slip quietly away rather than risk awakening the public to the REAL issue by having a highly-publicized trial.
Note that it is the European (non-elected) Commission that is the problem here.
The (elected) Parliament wants to do the right thing, but the appointed Commission (mainly consisting of fat-cat, non-elected professional politicians) does not.
In case there is any doubt: I loathe the Commission.
It's just as corrupt as the US administration is, and seems hell-bent on making the worst decision at every step. Exact same kind of people, that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a position of power, for the sake of everyone else.
Meh.